August 2014
Main publication concerning the method is Lièvre A., Brouard N. and Heathcote Ch. (2003) Estimating Health Expectancies from Cross-longitudinal surveys. Mathematical Population Studies.- 10(4), pp. 211-248. DOI 10.1080/713644739
Until June 2004 the installation did consist in a zip file which
had to be extracted in the directory of your choice. But with version
0.98d and above IMaCh we are using a windows installer (Inno setup).
In order to facilitate the use of IMaCh we associated the .imach
extension to two features: editing and running. Thus by right clicking
on a foo.imach file you can either 'edit'the file (default) with
the notepad editor or 'run' it with gnuplot (you need a recent version).
But we discovered that on some computers, people are not allowed
to modify the windows registry and need to have Administrator privileges.
Thus we built two windows installer: a standard setup which will install
the progam (usually in \Program Files\imach and will
modify the registry to associate .imach extension to notepad and imach, and a
second which will not alter the registry. With this second installer you
will be able to install the programs in your home directory and
run it by clicking on the imach.exe icon. But you won't be able
to use the facility of the right clicking.
The executable for Windows cross-compiled on OS/X with i386-mingw32-gcc doesn't produce efficient binary compared to native Visual Studio 2010 (used here). imach-0.98nV-1-setup.exe is compiled with i386-mingw32-gcc .
Old Windows versions are accessible here.
It take a litle more time to get version of Gnuplot 4.6.5+ for Mac OS/X and to compile it on a MaC. Currently graphs are output as png files. We will probably moved to svg because the svg format is scalable and thus figures are easier to improve and insert in other documents.
You can download a dmg file at imach0.98nX.dmg (md5sum ff9d2389abc2d3ce106203d89fd096d4). Like on Windows, two sub-directories are created bin and html . In the bin subdirectory you will find two executables imach itself and gnuplot.
You need to click on imach application and IMaCh will be
launched in a Terminal window, asking you to enter
a parameter file. A parameter file is a text file with an
extension .imach (but you can use a .txt extension
if you want. Among the parameters required, a data file name has to
be entered. It can be a relative file name
like ../../data/data1.txt.
If you open a new finder you
can drag an IMaCh parameter file into the terminal IMaCh Window that
you just created.
At the end of the run, and it order for the terminal window not to
disappear, the program will prompt for a command like "e" for
edit (with your browser) or "q" for quit.
The consequence for you is just that you have to use your finder
or browser (there is no more difference now) and click on the
.html (or .htm) file created. The filename of this html
file has the same name as your parameter file, only the extension
.imach is changed to .html.
New (August 2014) You can download a binary tar file for respectively a 32 bits or 64 bits Linux box:
cf9784f1d3f464b2f0c7ddf2fea84062 imach-Linux-0.98nX-linux-i586-bin.tar.bz2
or 0974bcf30596f94f97d0e80acaf5a1bb imach-Linux-0.98nX-linux-x86-64-bin.tar.bz2
The binaries have been crosscompiled with gcc on my OS/X Mac. Each binary contains two directories bin and html/doc . In the bin subdirectory you will find the imach executable and in html/doc the biaspar.imach test parameter file and its corresponding data file data1.txt. In order to run the test the command is ./bin/imach ./html/doc/biaspar.imach
gnuplot should be installed otherwise at the end of the run (optimization and calculations last at least 7 minutes on today most efficient hardwares) the command gnuplot biaspar.gp will fail. If successful, typing e will open biaspar.htm with your browser and all the results including graphs generated by gnuplot will appear. Please subscribe to the mailing list imach-users@listes.ined.fr for comments and reports on the performance (see the Performance section of the wiki).
Click here to access to the detailed documentation
This software have been partly granted by Euro-REVES, a concerted action from the European Union. In 2003-2004 it has been granted by the French Institute on Longevity. In January 2014, it has been granted by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research 25293121.
Our work is copyrighted as a GNU software product, i.e. program and software can be distributed freely for non commercial use, but actually some sources are not widely distributed today because they borrow some codes from the book "Numerical Recipes in C" which is copyrighted. If you are an owner of theses sources you can get our sources by asking us with a simple justification (name, email, Institute) mailto:imach-dev@listes.ined.fr
Today we are two developpers only but we already use a private CVS server. The CVS server will be freely accessible as soon as we have replaced "Numerical Recipes in C maximization routines" with equivalent routines from the new GNU scientific library.
Latest documentation can be accessed at http://euroreves.ined.fr/imach/wiki/index.php/Documentation
There is a public mailing list of IMaCh's users. You can subscribe by sending a mail to imach-users-subscribe@listes.ined.fr (and unsubscribe with imach-users-unsubscribe@listes.ined.fr
Wikis are a very promising way to give information closer to your expectations. It also a very dynamic movement if you consider the first International Wikimedia Conference in Francfurt (August 2005), where most Wikis were represented and in particular Wikipedia.
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